I am doing a practice swatch for my teacher. She says if my stitches are neat and correct, we can start learning knitting on the round. The pattern is 8 row knit, 1 row purl, 1 row knit, 1 row purl, and start over. For some reason my purl is on opposite side. I did them over starting at the row of knit before the purl, but the same thing happened. What did I do wrong?

The back of a knit st is a purl st and the back of a purl is a knit. The purls will be the back side of the knit rows, so if you knit a row then purl a row they'll all be on the same side. The 8 knit rows make garter which can look like purls but if you stretch them apart you can see the knit sts in the valleys between the purls.